152 · Superman

• YOU ARE SUPERMAN
• Introductions
  • Superman
    • Comics in ‘38
    • I have many problems with Superman
  • Video Game Superheroes
    • Spider-Man, Arkham, Marvel VS Capcom
    • Infamous
• Overview/Plot
  • In the game, the player controls Superman on a quest to save the city of Metropolis from the evil Lex Luthor and a gang of criminals that were exiled from the planet Krypton.
  • There’s an overhead map of various locations in the city that the player can travel to, with animated scenes, but then gameplay switches to a more traditional side-scrolling adventure game.
• Gameplay
  • THE LOOK OF SUPERMAN
    • Believe it or not he’s even more Chibi in the Japanese version
    • On the main menu screen he looks like a cyclops
  • Missions and Openness of the game
    • Conversing with Civilians for hints
      • It’s kinda Simon’s Quest all over again. But more fun!
    • Explore, but don’t expect to find much
      • As you travel through Metropolis, make a note of the location of various buildings that you pass by reading the placards on the side of the buildings. While they may not be essential to your current task, you may be asked to visit those locations later in the game. Knowing where certain buildings are can greatly reduce the time it takes to complete the game by cutting down on how much searching you must do.
      • Superman rides the subway? LIKE AS SUPERMAN…
    • Daily Planet headlines between chapters
  • I can’t believe this is the gameplay loop for a Superman game
  • The Hitbox of enemies and you
  • Superman Super Powers
    • Energy bar controls if you are Superman or Clark Kent (changing in phone booths)
    • x-ray vision (make certain enemies visible)
      • "Superman is now unable to see inside buildings, as Lex has lined all the buildings in Metropolis with lead!"
    • superflight
    • super spin
      • spin around incredibly fast and behave like a drill, creating a hole in the ground and permitting him to explore underground spaces.
    • heat vision (laser attack)
    • super breath 1 and super breath 2 (freeze enemies)
    • Superman is less powerful than Mario if you think about it
      • Jumping on heads hurts Superman
  • The big bads
    • Lex Luthor to General Zod and a Chinese gang that’s somehow gaming the stock market
    • Jay Falk is a corrupt politician with ties to organized crime, who only appears in one issue, The Adventures of Superman Vol 1 Issue 428, in May 1987.
    • Lex Luthor looks deformed
  • THIS GAME IS MISSING THE POWER OF BEING SUPERMAN. You feel like you’re playing Superman’s nightmare.
• Development
  • The Japanese release featured a synthesized version of the film's score, but in the US version, these songs are replaced by music recycled from another Famicom game from Kemco.
  • the Japanese version of the game uses Manhattan as the actual setting of the game, using different labels on the map that reflect actual locations and landmarks from New York City.
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • Not the first Superman Game. That honor goes to Superman on Atari 2600 back in 1979. And what a bizarre game that looks like
  • Superman: The Game for computers came out in 85
  • Another game called Superman came out in 1988 as well, but for Arcades only. It looks much more advanced.
  • A bunch of releases we can’t quite cover all of em. Superman 64 needs to be mentioned.
    • Actually called New Adventures of Superman
  • Would you believe me if I said the last Superman game was released in 2006. Superman Returns
  • How do you make a Superman game. The most common idea is to make him all powerful no holding back and instead have the game be dependent on a city health bar.
• EGL
• Next week - Xenophobe

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 You are Superman!

00:17 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Superman. And I'm Sam. Super Sam? No, just Sam. I'm Sean, sorry. And Sean, we know it's you, don't worry. No one would mistake that voice.

00:40 Okay, I mean, just laugh, that's fine. Also acknowledging that it's you. We're talking about Superman today, guys. You know, he had comics in 1938, and then he just kind of vanished.

00:51 Really? Yeah, he hasn't really been seen, right? Like, since 1938. Like, even now? No, of course not. Superman's always around. He's always been around. He sees you when you're sleeping. He's probably the most popular superhero of all time. Maybe Batman is slowly creeping up on him, but I think Superman is, like, world-renowned and everything.

01:14 I have many problems with Superman, and I'm not going to really get into all of them in this episode. He's got the Mary Sue syndrome. I just, yeah, I really don't enjoy Superman. And the only Superman comic that I've ever enjoyed has been All-Star Superman, which I'm sure, like, a lot of people will be like, well, of course. Yeah, of course, right. But, like, him actually fighting is not something I look forward to.

01:38 Him being, like, the symbol of American justice is nice and all, but it's not something that I read comics for. I'm much more of a Batman guy and a lot more of a Spider-Man guy, so that's where I come into this whole thing. But I'm not going to judge this Superman game on the fact that I don't like Superman. I want to hear what, Sean and Sam, what you guys think of Superman. So, Sean, you go first.

02:01 Yeah, I've always sort of seen Superman as just, like, the generic superhero. I mean, I guess he's the first, so I guess that defines generic, but he doesn't seem to have all that much of an interesting personality. He basically just has all of the powers. So, I never found him all that interesting. I really liked, I also liked Batman more because it seemed a little bit more grounded.

02:28 And Spider-Man more just because it was more fun. It just seems like every other superhero is better at something. But in reality, better at nothing because Superman will always be better than them. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Storytelling-wise. It's insane. It's insane, actually, though, that that's, like, a thing. Like, whatever superpowers, say, Aquaman has, I guess, technically, Superman has them all as well. And I know somebody's going to tell me that's not true, but I'm just trying to make the point of, like, you know, if he is every superhero, then he's really no superhero.

03:02 Whoa. Wow. Anyway, Sam? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the coolest thing about Superman is his origin story. You know, your planet is going away. And so, you get sent off to a random planet inhabited by humans, which is maybe a mistake. But, you know, I think that's pretty cool. I think it sucks that, like, a rock is his weakness. That's kind of lame. In a hard time. In a hard time. In a hard time.

04:00 there's lots of time travel stuff with the flash that i think that when you're a character like superman and you're just kind of good at everything it makes for like more boring stories

04:12 because just it's like kind of dragon ball z syndrome where you just kind of have to have like bigger and bigger and escalating and escalating kind of situations to make it interesting yeah and yet his greatest villain is a bald man yeah who throws rocks at him with no powers yeah yeah uh you know let's also take a minute to talk about video game superhero stuff like you know nowadays we have uh insomniac spider-man and the arkham series and even like fighting games like marvel versus capcom or injustice like video game superheroes are big now and they are going to be

04:48 like big but not good in the future but this is our first superhero game on the nes and i just don't really um i don't know what the expectation was for me going into this i kind of i guess expected just to beat them up where you're just superman and you fly around and you punch other superpowered things and take on like you know a classic superman villain uh maybe like bizarro or you know uh i i don't know who else is around anyway that's not the point dark side yeah that that's one other one there you go i'm showing my superman cred you know i think other than like infamous right like

05:29 that's an example of another game i think of where it's like oh that's a superhero that was created just for video games most superhero video games now are just like based off of either marvel or dc stuff and that's just what you get where where is the landscape for video game superheroes in general for you on the nes and in you know in today's times i i mean from what i remember of like when i first

05:56 started playing video games in the super nes era uh superhero video games was it was just going to be a beat-em-up it was going to be a side-scrolling game where you punch and maybe there'd be some kind of power that was emblematic of the hero in question but the predominant mode of playing the game would have just been walking to the right and jumping and punching um right like now yeah like after

06:30 uh like after the uh spider-man game on the xbox and ps2 which sort of uh introduced us to like a new way of uh exploring a superhero game and then with like arkham uh asylum which sort of perfected uh the like the style of fighting and interaction with the world that would go on to dominate the genre um now they're a lot more fun they're just as formulaic in some senses but uh they

07:05 they don't share as much design philosophy uh with other games than they did before like that they they have sort of coalesced into like this this uh list of design rules that are superhero games and like if you don't if you aren't a superhero you usually have a different way of playing the game i don't know if that if that makes sense to you guys the way i'm describing it but i think so i mean

07:31 you look at insomniac spider-man and it definitely seems like you know great game stands on its own but they they learned a lot from arkham yeah they learned a lot um but yeah i mean there's definitely been a lot of evolution between this game and the current uh the current state of affairs uh but yeah i mean it it stood the test of time superhero games still happen yeah and sam anything dad uh just that

07:57 when i think of superhero games i think of one the first superhero game that i played which was spider-man on n64 which as i remember i only rented it but as i remember it was a really fun time and they still the movement was still fun i think spider-man games are always just going to be fun just because moving as spider-man is cool and i was also thinking about that uh x-men arcade game that

08:22 you can play with a bunch of people that is just a classic beat-em-up and i guess that's kind of more what we were sort of expecting with this one not with all the people obviously but a single player kind of thing like that yeah i think that x-men game is spot on to like how i imagine my 2d uh video my 2d superhero games to go you know it's either you do that or you make it a versus game yeah fight

08:47 off against a bunch of different intermediate period where basically the only way you'd play a good superhero game was whether it was like marvel versus capcom or something right right i mean that has a whole line of its own you know because first that was an x-men game then it became a marvel superheroes game and then became marvel versus capcom so like that has its own story we're gonna focus

09:08 on superman here as i mentioned you are superman uh that is how i started the uh back of the box and that is true you play as superman and you're on a quest to save the city of metropolis which may or may not be manhattan all of a sudden um and you have to save it from the evil lex luther and a gang of criminals that were exiled from the planet krypton uh as sam mentioned that's where superman was born and he was shipped off here similar no different than like how goku was originally from um planet vegeta is that is that really where it's from yes the name of the planet is his arch nemesis that's funny

09:46 anyway there's an overhead map of various locations in the city that the player can travel to with animated scenes but gameplay occurs on a traditional side-scrolling adventure way where you are switching between being clark kent and superman and you're kind of just like you know as clark kent you're doing your reporting jib you're just trying to get like the daily beat and figure out what's going on in each mission you talk to some people you get some answers uh usually they're pretty straightforward

10:13 and sometimes you just get some slice of life stuff too but you are lying through your teeth like this is the most disingenuous description of a video game we've had on this show it happens it all happens sean it just doesn't happen well okay but it's going to happen you are going to start this game as clark kent yeah you are going to talk to your uh your pal um jimmy olsen and he's gonna take a picture of you that you don't get to see it just it just says click and then like fades out uh you will talk to lois lane and she will tell you that something funny is going on at metropolis park so you are kind of like collecting clues just not in a way that's very different from say

10:58 the way that we were collecting clues in castlevania 2 yeah um but the way that you initially described this of just like there are two modes of gameplay uh well as your clark kent you're going to be more exploratory and uh it's not the way it is it's like yes you will talk to npcs and get information out of them but uh basically you're clark kent and you punch weak uh or you're superman and you punch less weak that's how i'd describe it and you have superpowers and you're like two feet tall yes everyone's two feet tall there's just something weird about no not everyone i'll get to that in a minute but almost everyone but there's just something wrong right like there's no way that it was like a

11:50 sprite limitation this was an artist interpretation of what superman should look like on an nes game and it's all wrong guys it's like a cabbage patch kid big head little body honestly like i think there are you know it's like a funko pop superman is yes exactly it's a funko pop uh and it yeah it's weird because i i feel like if like i can see the game like with relatively anatomically correct players like

12:20 uh characters i can i can see it when i look at this game uh that it should have been that way and it may have been a bit more acceptable um but and but like you can get around it after playing it for a couple minutes i guess why make everybody so small if everything else is going to be gigantic right you got 20 foot ceilings you got you know filled with nothing by the way they're just the

12:48 wall being really long yeah and then the desk and then the phone on top of the desk which is the same size as the desk so it's like love the phone what is the scale of things in this place if superman is head is as tall as the desk now i get it it's really not that big of a deal they chose to do it this way and that's just the way things are but they tease you right on the main menu with a really

13:13 good looking superman that you expect to play as i i did expect that because i i didn't look at anything i didn't even read the manual for this game before i started playing it i then went and read the manual but um that that that really made me feel like cheated because i really did think that this was going to be a somewhat competent game uh sorry that kind of spoils me no it's fine it's fine because

13:42 look they they design as i mentioned the 20 foot ceilings right with nothing going on between them but superman or clark kent doesn't matter who you are no matter what you are you can jump that whole 20 feet like you just soar into the air and you're very floaty and i think that that was just a lazy programming attempt to get around like certain obstacles and and you know dodge enemies and stuff like that like they couldn't make it so this way you just jump slightly over things it had to be like this all or nothing moon physics where you just like jump over everything and they can jump the same height too so it does it's not much better that way but this is this is an immediate introduction

14:29 to the game you know you start in the daily planet you automatically recognize your size you recognize the world you get a feel for how this game is going to play and the the jankiness of it all uh to steal a word from sam but you don't get to experience the fighting right away and i think that once you experience what it's like to fight in this game that's the moment where you really know what you're playing yeah so um i'm gonna come back to the jump in just a second because there's a lot to say about it but it's really best spoken about in the context of fighting um so you're gonna leave the

15:12 daily planets and you're gonna go out and start to fight some guys in suits and they shoot guns at you your only real move is to punch uh whether you're clark kent or you're superman you just gotta punch yeah you've got a bunch of superpowers that are in your back pocket but they don't really work here um so you either punch or you jump to dodge and the the thing about the jump isn't just like it's not like a mario jump where judging by how long you hold the button down and what directions you push you can modulate its height like we like we have seen become a rule in side scrolling games

15:55 like this uh no you always jump the 30 feet that uh that mike said and there's really no way to change that uh you can try to attack in midair and that sort of pauses you in uh in your jump uh that i guess you could use that to sort of uh edit your movement like that that could be your way of of becoming more precise but in any case like you're trying to dodge bullets you're trying to dodge enemies that are punching you and if you even jump on them you're gonna take damage you're gonna get you're gonna jump into bullets because you move at the same like speed as them uh it it really is just like a holistic

16:42 a holistically bad design in it like in the way that you uh that they have went into combat for this game think about what you just said there sean that if you jump and you land on an enemy's head you will take the damage yeah in the nes universe that makes mario stronger than superman because his primary method of attack is jumping on people's heads that's true i mean and he's able to do that that being said mario doesn't get to hit people from the side until i think the super nes but i think

17:19 that just because like that that's still i think that still puts mario above superman here but the punching is weird in this game right am i wrong in thinking no i feel super weird it's it's really weird it just like throws out a hitbox somewhere in front of you like right in front of you but you're not really sure where that starts because you're the the punching animation

17:39 doesn't you don't see it yeah it's just like a thing in front of you that happens and your guy moves his tiny little stubby arm a little bit and then one yeah one way that kind of made that was i was able to kind of perceive it was if you look at the size of your chibi super mario your chibi superman um and you made his outline like a grid box and then you sort of like mentally extrapolated that all around him you can you kind of like if if an enemy walks into the next grid box next to you the punch would hit yes that's what i'm thinking of it's like if you're a square and your enemy's a square you actually want to punch the square that could fit in the middle of both of you yes and

18:26 that's what you so you look like you're punching nothing you look like you're punching thin air between you and your enemy but that somehow connects and lands a hit the thing that bugs me the most i think is that in the comics you see people shoot at superman and then the bullets just break on his chest nothing happens you know whereas this one you get shot and you're like ow so i don't know that just that just bugged me about it well i also don't remember any of superman's superpowers having like a limit to them you know i understand that for the gameplay though and i i kind of understand the bullet thing for the gameplay but like come on it's superman you're supposed to be able to plow through

19:05 people there is one thing that this game is trying to do and that's the unexpected route we talked about how we were expecting a beat-em-up and they went with uh you know an adventure game where you have to like figure out what to do based on talking to npcs and stuff like that i won't say it's a role-playing game but it it has you know it has some elements in there that i wouldn't have expected because we haven't seen them in in a lot of games on the nes yet you know you start off it's like um it's chapter one you gotta find out what's going on in metropolis park and you know you talk to people you you have to get to metropolis park whether you walk or you fly i don't know why superman wouldn't

19:46 fly but or take the subway yeah well that's chapter two chapter two superman needs a ticket he can't just fly over the turnstile he can't also just fly he needs to take the subway and furthermore this is what i was getting to sam the subway interior has silhouettes of giant people sitting real size subway seats yeah like full-size people so it's almost like they were designing a subway based nes game right and at the same time they were developing the superman game and then the subway based game got scrapped and they were like oh well we can use these backgrounds for the superman game you know like yeah they don't really work but we made them

20:29 maybe it was like a different artist did different things for the game like the background that's what it has to be the background artist was not on the same page yeah he just wasn't in the loop yeah like oh it's superman he's gonna look like a like a guy and he's like right and he's gonna fly all the time so make the ceilings really big no no he looks like a little dumpling man you got it all wrong

20:50 so i want to talk about the the missions and openness of the game because uh i mentioned the simon's quest thing i think that this one has uh pretty faithful translations i don't think anyone misleads you or directly lies to you but uh there's also some civilians you can talk to and they just say really funny things so that's nice slice of life shit i don't know what's happening yeah but the uh yeah i think that is somebody says that right it's either i don't know what's happening or i don't know what's going on right and that's like that's a very relatable thing to say nowadays i feel that

21:25 you know uh but but did you guys get this sense of exploration like the talking with civilians and going on your mission like was that helpful or do you almost wish they just made this like level one and you're just in the park the entire level and then level two you're just at the next you know you're on the subway level three you go to zod's uh sorry like luther's place like did you wish it was like that instead i mean like if we're gonna talk about that like yeah if they executed properly i would have preferred this more exploratory frame of reference but if it's going to be done this way

22:03 i would have just wanted them to do like i'm just gonna walk to the right beat up dudes go to level two uh because i i didn't know what the hell i was doing uh for a while until i watched some video of other people playing this and i'm like oh that's how i use these powers that's how i fly to the park i didn't even know if the park was where i was supposed to go but um i it was it was just as obtuse in some ways as castlevania 2 maybe even more so i don't know the thing that got me was that when

22:37 you use the fly power you can look on the map at all the different places but you can't select where you want to go right i mean i was able to select you can select but they make it very hard sam uh you have to have the you have to have the superpower turned on for your flight yeah and you have to go back into that menu you have to pop the clutch top yeah yeah you have to toggle through the i think with the a button to choose which way you want to be and then it like lights up that area and then you hit the start button and that cues not an awesome shmup style flying thing where you fly

23:15 and dodge things or even attack controlling him but no right instead it's just like a cut scene of you flying no i i flew but i didn't i felt like i wasn't able to control where i was flying to oh no you can't it's just a cut scene right but when that map you selected oh you didn't that match was up i feel like i couldn't select it maybe you have to press the a button to toggle through the different i guess i just not the not the d-pad yeah but no that stinks and it's funny because you can get

23:41 around the game without flying like you can walk to things it just takes forever however some people recommend that because you'll miss some cool collectibles and power-ups and stuff like that if you if you just fly from place to place but i wasn't trying to hang out i'm not trying to 100 this game yeah yeah so i i was definitely doing the flying route the thing about just exploring in general is certain dialogue conversations are relying on the chapter right so a lot of times to get the

24:10 right amount of clues you'll have to talk to everybody again and you didn't want to talk to everybody the first time to begin with because it was kind of a hassle because you didn't know who was going to tell you something useful and who wasn't so that you know that part becomes a hassle every single chapter and then on top of that as you travel through metropolis they put these little um placards on the buildings that you're supposed to like make a note of being like oh i don't need to go here now but that's the name of this building and if it comes up in chapter two or three i'll know where it is because

24:38 i made a mental map in my head or on paper of where everything was you are a reporter right but you won't know that those that which buildings are ever important and which ones aren't just by like looking at them you have to get to that part of the story so the exploration part is more just like a checklist of things you know yeah just uh without the checklist just brute force through every place that you've seen uh and do it again yeah now that said the some of the clues are are very helpful and you'll be able to figure out what to go where to go relatively fast but again if the

25:15 objective here was to make exploration and openness like a thing right like you're actually exploring metropolis that's not the right way to handle it in my opinion you don't like you don't make it so easy to find out what your next thing is that you don't have to talk to everyone but give the option to talk to everyone but at the same time also make sure that the player writes down every location and building they see so that if they have to go to them again you know it's like it's two ends of an extreme for a game that's already asking you to to do a lot combat and and uh platforming wise

25:50 yeah and i also think that there was a really weird um just going into the design of these levels or sections areas uh there wasn't a lot of information given as to like if you're in an important place because there's a lot of buildings you can go into and they're going to be filled with mobs um and then there'll be one where you like oh finally there's some verticality to it and you go down to like these basements and then you fight what is ostensibly a boss um but i just happened upon that building yeah same i wasn't like i like even when i walked in i'm like oh this is an important place it's just like oh i can finally go down or up like so i i beat the

26:39 first boss on accident sort of uh but there's there's just so little visual communication like yeah you can talk to npcs and kind of get a gist of where you're supposed to go but the rest of the game is not in step with that otherwise i would have known where i was like intuitively like oh this is like a dungeon it wasn't yeah i i can't believe that this is the gameplay loop of a superman game a guy who you know essentially like takes care of metropolis as his own and he's just kind of as you wandering around like a stranger just walking into things and hoping that he finds the villains you

27:21 know uh i i can't believe that's what they went with and it doesn't change really between levels like between chapters rather like it just okay here it is all over again but this time find the boss in a different location like maybe this game is just like a character study that's trying to get you to see to sort of humanize superman that like you know even superman doesn't really know what he's doing with his life just like us even superman rides the subway yeah and just sort of stares off into space you know it's so weird that he's riding the subway as superman like he doesn't even change back into clark kent for it but honestly like if you were on the subway and a guy looked

28:01 like superman would you bat an eye i would be like all right you know i don't know the culture of metropolis in metropolis would be weird but yeah in manhattan it's fine and we say it's manhattan because it's not the statue of liberty is the statue of freedom and it's not the statue of liberty's face we're familiar with uh it's like this kawaii version of kirby or something yeah so that's all fine but we know that it's the statue of liberty and i believe in the japanese version of the game it's pretty much just manhattan like they never got the metropolis note which is funny yeah uh there's also it's missing the superman theme song this game you know from the movie

28:48 yeah that's the one

28:52 that's the one when harrison ford was superman for sure uh all right let's talk about the superman superpowers because we were no it's fine it's fine i actually think it's funny because i said it's missing the superman theme song like that's something that you could just go up to people on the street and be like quick hum me a few bars of the superman theme song that's like you know a lot of people it's just a different era but like a lot of people also think that about batman 1989 like that's a recognizable theme song and it's like it's i can't think of it off the top of my head tim burden orchestra madness thing you know it's like

29:35 it's like that's that's the world that's the world map music of final fantasy 7 i think it might be actually i think i might have been doing that instead i always default to the world map music of final fantasy 7 when i'm trying to hum music that i don't know we have to talk about superman superpowers because i promised it on the show i mean half the thing about being superman is having superpowers right yeah so he's he's got an energy bar that controls if you're superman or

30:02 clark kent uh we talked about that in the beginning you pretty much as long as you don't get hit too often you'll be superman for most of the game you do change in foam boots i like that that's a neat little touch they didn't have to do that they could have honestly just made uh the character like i wouldn't have been surprised if they just actually just change the character on the fly no no crossfade no animation that's just what you get smash cut but instead you have to change in foam boots which

30:29 is a nice touch and also makes the ads for some difficulty if you like transform back to clark kent because of your energy bar you have to go find a foam booth true you know uh there's x-ray vision which makes certain enemies visible uh which is strange but the manual explains that away they explain that by saying superman is now unable to see inside buildings as lex has lined all the buildings in metropolis with lead even when he's inside the building yeah they're just there's so

31:02 much lead in the building that it's distracting his super sight powers so he needs x-ray vision because i thought that i was okay so when i was in one of those uh those dungeons or what have you um i thought i was either getting a visual glitch that there were way too many sprites and it was giving me like the sprites disappearing thing uh or the game was just bugged because i did keep getting hit for no reason i had no idea that that's what x-ray vision was for that makes a lot more sense now

31:34 yeah and it's primarily used later on in the game it's very important uh i think for it's it's honestly it's either lex or zod's people who uh who require the x-ray vision so you'll need that so there's x-ray vision there's super flight which you need to be able to fly and to be honest it's a terrible idea that that has like a meter to it like that you can only fly as far as your meter allows you to so sometimes you can't fly that far because that's like one of superman's big things otherwise you take him the subway right you know it's just crazy though it's like he doesn't

32:10 you know like when you think of superman you think of him like it's a bird it's a plane it's superman you don't think like oh it's his energy meter's down so give him a break like let him rest for a second but he can still leap buildings in a single bound that's true that's true that part's still allowed uh super spin this lets you spin around incredibly fast and behave like a drill creating a

32:32 hole in the ground and letting uh you explore underground spaces great glad it exists don't remember that yeah yeah i'm sure he could do it don't get me wrong i just don't think it's like a big thing for him i don't think that's one of his like signature superpowers probably gets dizzy so he doesn't do that one a lot yeah then we have the heat vision which is his laser attack uh i liked

32:55 using this because then i didn't have to worry about the weird hitbox square between me and the other enemy that does that does remove that yes thank you uh for that john that was good input i'm a good imputer yeah we have super breath one and super breath two super breath two lets you freeze zombies very important because there will be zombies in the game oh those are the those are the green-headed guys yeah okay i didn't i didn't really like parse those as zombies i just thought that they were some kind of monster i might be reading into it that they're zombies they might they might be monsters but i i you're trying to pass off your conjecture as lore i think that one of

33:40 the npcs in the game tells you that super breath two freezes zombies okay like just spells it out for you like that but i like how the npc character tells you super breath two you know like like they know the technical name of superman superpower as super breath two don't use super breath one superman it's super breath two and also why would the npc know that but not superman himself there's been monday morning quarterbacks monday morning superheroes right now i hate that uh superman also has a another superpower listed in the manual thing but like it's it doesn't have a meter attached to it and i think it's just for show but it's that it's that jumping one i think i think he does like the

34:26 jump yeah he likes to jump can we talk about the big bads in this game because you know this is the moment for me where i'm like all right at least there's something going on in relation to the comics and that that whole thing well i know that zod is a part of it uh and i know that uh superman is apparently uh very interested in what goes on with the stock market in this game only when the chinese get involved yeah oh so it's very much related to 2020 it's like if if it's just normal wall street people fixing the stock market you know he's like those are the market makers it's fine like i'm i'm fine with this once chinese gangs get involved he's like i will not stand for this corruption in america

35:17 so he teams with the sec i'm sorry no the fbi is in this game yes the fbi is in this game uh but i think they're only for are they for the stock market side i remember them at zod's uh chapter but i don't know if they show up in the stock it's all a blur to me great you know you also have to deal with lex luther though too he's he's causing problems too and he looks deformed in this game they all do yeah i know but like lex luther looks really bad he looks like boss baby boss baby he does yeah he does he's

35:52 the one chilling in the park right no no is he who's chilling i don't remember him from the park i i actually i'm thinking about the boss fight where he like brought him okay that's not kingpin that's that's a spider-man daredevil this was not in a uh in a boss fight this was okay yeah i'm thinking of the one where lex luther brings like his bodyguard to the boss fight and shoots he has the bodyguard

36:14 shoot at you for him and it's like it doesn't matter anyway right like isn't superman's chest made of like rubber you would think so he just bounces the bullets i don't know then i needed to bring this up in one of the chapters the boss fight is with jay falk a corrupt politician with ties to organized crime must be the stock market chapter here's why that's bizarre to me jay falk only appeared in one

36:42 issue of superman ever the adventures of superman volume one issue 428 in may of 1987 so that means that like they were making this game and they were like we need a new villain like who's gonna be our guy you know like we we're it's 1988 the game's coming out well oh well you know they just announced this new guy jay falk and they're like oh let's put him in he'll be a great villain he's just a politician

37:09 i mean that is interesting though that like they're actually using some pretty deep cuts like that's the deepest cut i've ever seen somebody yeah somebody is actually reading the comics so uh they i mean they didn't do a very good job but at least they put the research in or they are going into a comic book store seeing what the most recent villain is or like the first one that they see and it happens to be this one because it's the newest issue yeah all right sure this guy it's entirely possible as well so if you get all the way to zod at the end i think you have to do like a boss rush with him and two other people from krypton uh krypton and afterwards you get like this cute little cutscene

37:51 ending where the three of them are like launched into space and then like a different parallel universe like opens up and they get stuck in there and then it closes so they'll never be able to come back to this one makes you wonder why didn't superman do that in the most recent superman movie instead of snapping his neck you know that was strange right like just send him to another universe you don't have to snap his neck zach snyder um but that happened and that's the end of the game and it's also the same way that the beginning of the game is it's the statue of freedom talking to you in the beginning of the game saying go save metropolis and in the ending it's like you saved metropolis very good

38:32 superman it's like very strange there's a certain number of characters that can fit in the statue of freedoms text box but it always gets like the important like last word of a sentence cut off to the very next text box it's just an annoying thing like it shouldn't have been done that way they should have just figured out a way to make that last word of each sentence fit because it happens so

38:54 often it's like congratulations you have done it and then you hit a superman period it's like no like just get that in there like well my fan theory about this iteration of superman because i think this exists in its own superman like side universe um is that uh this superman the statue of liberty is actually superman's mom uh because she just has a very like maternal nature uh like talks about how

39:27 she's very supportive of him um that's really it but like whenever i spoke to the statue of freedom uh i i got like a mom vibe and in a way i guess like that would be his new mom like america and freedom and everything like that and his dad in some ways is this yeah he had a mom and then he had another mom and now he's getting a third mom that's like this is the real mom save some moms for the rest

39:54 of us superman i think that's crazy technically mars needs moms wow deep cuts there the two okay uh i'm being told by our audio producer that they didn't get sent to a parallel universe they got sent to the phantom zone i'm pretty sure that's true i remember just another word for the shadow realm or yeah it's like where you know when yugi uh from yugioh when he finishes a fight against kaiba

40:21 any of the uh yugioh cards that died in battle go to the shadow the phantom zone with with zod the statue of liberty yeah the statue of freedom yeah his mom yugi's mom we never find out about yugi's mom we never find out about his dad though either that was his grandfather yeah uh who got like trapped in a card after giving yugi's a video tape oh it was it was a card yeah from a video yeah it's fine it's fine uh anything else you guys want to talk about for this game not yugioh it seems like you were ready to say something until i said not yugioh

41:04 you you may very well be right uh but no there's there's really nothing so

41:26 Thank you.

42:26 Whoa. That's a long time ago. What a bizarre game that is, though. Like, look up some footage of Superman Atari 2600. You won't believe how lucky you are to have this game on the NES when you look back at that game. And I've linked all these games in the show notes. So if you guys want to just check out the notes, you can click on videos that take you to YouTube to watch how these games play out. I do that all the time. Is this one also chibi? No, it's not chibi. It actually has a muscular Superman. Oh. As muscular as you can make. Already better. No, think about how you could make an Atari 2600 game. We're talking about some squares, you know. Big squares. Yeah, big squares.

43:10 Superman the Game for Computers came out in 1985. So that's three years before this game. And it doesn't look much better, but it also doesn't look worse. So that's important. And if you want to play early Superman games, maybe consider that as an option.

43:26 Another game called Superman came out in 1988 as well. But it was for the arcades only. And that looks like the real deal. Like, that looks like a really good-looking Superman who flies around and beat up, you know, random enemies before taking on big bosses. Like, that looks like the game I want. And I know why we can't get it on the NES, but I would hope that we could someday get a port of that arcade game to the NES, like, with less graphics or whatever. Because that's the Superman game I'm looking for.

43:56 All right. You got me excited. Yeah, sorry. Whenever I choose to play that. Yeah, just if you find a Superman arcade, first off, I think that's pretty rare. I've never seen one of those before. But if you find one, play it. You know, we could do all of the releases for Superman, but I think that would just take a long time. So instead, I'm just going to skip right ahead.

44:16 Superman 64 needs to be mentioned. It's considered one of the worst games of all time. Is that really a sequel, though? No, no, none of these are sequels, but this section is called sequels and spinoffs. Sure, sure. Technically. What do you do? Sequel spinoffs and legacy? Is that what you want it to be called? I mean, that would be more accurate, I guess. There's no alliteration in that, so I reject it. Anyway, Superman 64. We have to mention that game. It's considered one of the worst.

44:43 I don't know if it's actually really even that bad. I played the game. Yeah, it's really not good. But I can't imagine, like, if I had my choice between Superman 64 for the rest of my days or this. Can't say for certain I'd know which one I'm going to pick ahead of time. And it's also not called Superman 64. It's actually called The New Adventures of Superman. A lot of people don't know that. A lot of people just call it Superman 64. It never says that anywhere.

45:08 That's peculiar. Would you believe me if I said that the last Superman game, like, ever, was released in 2006? We haven't had a Superman game where it's Superman, you know? Like, we've had him in other games, like Lego games or in Injustice and stuff like that. But the last Superman game was in 2006 for the movie Superman Returns. I had no idea. I can't even, like, visualize the game, though. So I do believe you. I think it's got to be, like, a Spider-Man 2 style thing, you know? Where you just have, like, the whole city of Metropolis to explore, but nothing really happens. And all the fights are terrible.

45:48 Sounds cool. Which leads me to my final question. Not a sequel and spinoff thing, but how do you make a Superman game? I think, like, the most common idea that I see is just make him super powerful like he is. Like, totally acknowledge that the guy is invincible. And instead, the game is dependent on, like, the health of the city. You know? So, like, Superman constantly has to make sure that, like, crime is low. No one's dying. Lex Luthor's not getting away with his plans. The other villains aren't getting away with their plans. If someone from Krypton shows up, he can take them down. Like, I think that's a pretty neat idea. I'm open to other ideas, though. I can see it as a kind of shmup, you know?

46:35 I'm listening. You have my attention. You have all these powers, and you have to use certain powers to clear certain obstacles. Otherwise, you can't get through. And so it's like a strategic shmup. That's my thing. I could see that. I mean, you know what? That's different, because I bet that's never been done yet, a Superman shmup. And I wouldn't mind it. All right. So I guess I've got a little more of a goofball answer. So I haven't played this game, but I've heard a lot of things about it. The game Catherine, where it's sort of like a dating sim, but also like a puzzle game,

47:15 from what I gather. No, you're right. I played a little bit of it. Okay. So the dating sim is Lois Lane, just trying to get Lois. And then like the puzzle elements are like, you know, you being a super powered person. And like, because in that game, like failure by getting beat up by random dudes isn't really a thing. It kind of makes more sense that we just be more of like a mind thing. So it would be more like Catherine. Wow. I love that answer. I got another one. Go for it. Now that I think about it, I think that Superman could be good in VR. I feel like that would be a fun kind of VR game. You know, flying around, you have your laser blast, so you're moving your head to aim.

48:10 I like that. I see that because that could be like a short thing, you know, where it's more like just experience. Or like a playground toy. Yeah, exactly. Experience being Superman. Yeah. You're like God complex kind of. I mean, I would just use it to like laser beam eye like a skyscraper in half and be evil Superman. Totally. Yeah. Well, we have to decide if the game is good or bad. Not good or evil. No game has ever been voted evil on the essential games list, but we do vote if they're good or bad, essential or not. And we're going to do that right now on the essential games list.

48:54 So remember, the game can't be evil. Just because I said that we don't vote it that way earlier doesn't mean like, oh, now I'm going to vote this one to be evil. You can't do that. It's either yes or no. It's an essential game or not. Sam, I'd love for you to start us off. This game is evil. Now, see, there you go. You did the thing that I told you not to do.

49:16 This game is all sorts of weird jank. It's just a weird kind of why is this the way it is the game? And it I don't know. It's not a great game. There's a lot in there, but it just is all kind of connected in these weird ways that don't really make sense. And it doesn't feel good to play. So I'm going to say wait for it. Not essential. So enough said there, Sam. Enough said. Sean. Yeah. One thing I didn't get to mention when we were actually talking about the game was also

49:54 aside from its weird visual style, is that this is also just a terrible looking game. Like it almost I'm not going to call it Popeye. Nothing's Popeye, but it's from that era. And I know that's only a part of what makes a game a game. But especially in this era, it's a pretty big deal. That being said, it's multitude of design faults and goofball decisions on how you're going to be a superhero. A very, very vulnerable superhero.

50:34 It just doesn't work. Like I don't enjoy playing as Chibi Superman. Superman. So that being said, this is a, this is an unessential game. Inessential for show. Okay. I love it. Inessential, unessential. It doesn't matter. It's not getting on the games list now because two people have voted it off. I will just add that the game is definitely not essential. It has a lot in it and it's, it could be a long game for, for even for speed runners. It seems like it's a pretty long game, but the game is missing one thing. It has a lot of everything else. It's missing the power of being Superman.

51:12 It actually like forgot that the whole thing about Superman is how incredible and awesome he is. And also how much fun it would be to be him that this game has none of that. This actually feels like you're playing, going back to the Catherine thing there for a second time. It feels like you're playing Superman's nightmare the entire time. Like he can't really, he's small, he's scrawny. He has like an energy bar for everything. So he has to like conserve his power. He punches and the punches don't really like, like he's punching the air. He loses his powers if he gets beat up too much also.

51:48 Yeah. It's bizarre. So, you know, we've used the, this is not the game. This is the game's nightmare analogy before for things, but I think it also fits here. So we'll see it again for sure. When I say that, uh, Sesame Street one, two, three, isn't Sesame Street one, two, three, it's Sesame Street one, two, three's nightmare. You'll know what I mean after we talk about it for 50 minutes. And we've been talking about this game for like 50 minutes. So I think it's time that we stop talking about this game. Start thinking about good games. Got a game next week called Xenophobe. I don't like that.

52:21 I don't like the name of that game, but, um, I doubt it has anything to do with, um, you know, what, what, what a dictionary might imply there. So, uh, I'm sure it's just going to be a game. Maybe it's about scary aliens from outer space. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's about being xenophobic towards those aliens. Maybe it's about confronting your biases.

52:42 Anyway, any way you slice it, it's going to be better than what it sounds like because it's a brand new year of nostalgia, baby. We're in 2021 now, and we're going to be in 2021 for another 51 weeks. So if you want 51 more great episodes to come up and you're like, well, xenophobes, just not cutting it. Don't worry. We have games like Zelda two, Mega Man two, Super Mario brothers two. Nope. That was last year.

53:10 Go back and listen to that one. Um, but there will be other twos. I'm sure of it. This is going 1989 when we're, we're almost there. When that happens, I'm sure it'll be the land of sequels for NES games. Cause that'll just be enough time that all of these like games that have been deemed hits for the NES. I imagine that now it'll be like, oh cool. We've had enough time to like make those sequels.

53:31 So look out for those. Look out for nostalgia. Look out for us on Twitter at nostalgia cast and look out for me. Uh, if you run into me on the street, look out for me. Like just watch out. My name is Michael Esposito. Uh, I'm at Esposito. Do not run into him. And do not run into me. I will run into you. Goodbye.